The Talent Code: Unlocking the Secret of Skill in Sports, Art, Music, Math, and Just About Anything

New research has revealed that myelin, once considered an inert form of insulation for brain cells, may be the holy grail of acquiring skill. Journalist Daniel Coyle spent years investigating talent hotbeds, interviewing world-class practitioners (top soccer players, violinists, fighter, pilots, artists, and bank robbers) and neuroscientists. In clear, accessible language, he presents a solid strategy for skill acquisition.

The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

Daniel Coyle spent the last few years traveling around the world and meeting with top coaches, teachers, and neurologists in order to unlock the secret of how greatness happens. Now he has taken his groundbreaking research and boiled it down to the essentials: 52 simple, proven rules for developing and growing talent in sports, art, music, business, or just about anything.

One of the most popular Fortune articles in many years was a cover story called "What It Takes to Be Great." Geoff Colvin offered new evidence that top performers in any field - from Tiger Woods and Winston Churchill to Warren Buffett and Jack Welch - are not determined by their inborn talents. Greatness doesn't come from DNA but from practice and perseverance honed over decades.

The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance

Are stars like Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, and Serena Williams genetic freaks put on Earth to dominate their respective sports? Or are they simply normal people who overcame their biological limits through sheer force of will and obsessive training? In this controversial and engaging exploration of athletic success, Sports Illustrated senior writer David Epstein tackles the great nature vs. nurture debate and traces how far science has come in solving this great riddle.

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Mindset is one of those rare audio books that can help you make positive changes in your life and at the same time see the world in a new way. A leading expert in motivation and personality psychology, Carol Dweck has discovered in more than 20 years of research that our mindset is not a minor personality quirk: it creates our whole mental world. It explains how we become optimistic or pessimistic. It shapes our goals, our attitude toward work, and ultimately predicts whether or not we will fulfull our potential.

The Identity Code: The 8 Essential Questions for Finding Your Purpose & Place in the World

In this life-transforming audiobook, Larry Ackerman introduces you to the person you were meant to be, and already are. The secret to uncovering your purpose, he explains, is built into you in the form of a code, the identity code. Much like your genetic code, your identity code provides a complete map of how you were designed to live.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

In flow, everyday experience becomes a moment by moment opportunity for joy and self-fulfillment. Flow is the brain-child of a fascinating psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a renowned social scientist who has devoted his life's work to the study of what makes people truly happy, satisfied and fulfilled. While much of the study of psychology investigates disorders of the human mind, Dr. Csikszentmihalyi takes a different route.

Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success

Few things in life are more satisfying than beating a rival. We love to win and hate to lose, whether it's on the playing field or at the ballot box, in the office or in the classroom. In this bold new look at human behavior, award-winning journalist and Olympian Matthew Syed explores the truth about our competitive nature: why we win, why we don't, and how we really play the game of life.

The Champion's Mind: How Great Athletes Think, Train, and Thrive

In The Champion's Mind, sports psychologist Jim Afremow, PhD, LPC, now offers the same advice he uses with Olympians, Heisman Trophy winners, and professional athletes, including tips and techniques based on high-performance psychology research, such as how to get in a "zone," thrive on a team, and stay humble; how to progress within a sport and sustain excellence long-term, and customizable pre-performance routines to hit full power when the gun goes off or the puck is dropped.

Outliers: The Story of Success

In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing.

Man's Search for Meaning

Internationally renowned psychiatrist, Viktor E. Frankl, endured years of unspeakable horror in Nazi death camps. During, and partly because of his suffering, Dr. Frankl developed a revolutionary approach to psychotherapy known as logotherapy. At the core of his theory is the belief that man's primary motivational force is his search for meaning.

The Practicing Mind: Developing Focus and Discipline in Your Life

Present moment awareness is an essential ingredient in life if one expects to experience any degree of authentic peace and contentment. It has been acknowledged for centuries as the cornerstone of spiritual awakening in all traditions of Eastern thought. In the West, however, it is still a relatively unrecognized concept for living. The Western mind is always restless, never content with the moment.

The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told about Genetics, Talent and IQ is Wrong

With irresistibly persuasive vigor, David Shenk debunks the long-standing notion of genetic giftedness, and presents dazzling new scientific research showing how greatness is in the reach of every individual. DNA does not make us who we are. Forget everything you think you know about genes, talent, and intelligence, he writes. In recent years, a mountain of scientific evidence has emerged suggesting a completely new paradigm: not talent scarcity, but latent talent abundance.

Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable

Direct, blunt, and brutally honest, Tim Grover breaks down what it takes to be unstoppable: You keep going when everyone else is giving up, you thrive under pressure, you never let your emotions make you weak. In "The Relentless 13", he details the essential traits shared by the most intense competitors and achievers in sports, business, and all walks of life.

The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance

The Art of Learning takes listeners through Waitzkin's unique journey to excellence. He explains in clear detail how a well-thought-out, principled approach to learning is what separates success from failure. Waitzkin believes that achievement, even at the championship level, is a function of a lifestyle that fuels a creative, resilient growth process.

How Music Works: The Science and Psychology of Beautiful Sounds, from Beethoven to the Beatles and Beyond

Have you ever wondered how off-key you are while singing in the shower? Or if your Bob Dylan albums really sound better on vinyl? Or why certain songs make you cry? Now, scientist and musician John Powell invites you on an entertaining journey through the world of music. Discover what distinguishes music from plain old noise, how scales help you memorize songs, what the humble recorder teaches you about timbre (assuming your suffering listeners don’t break it first), and more.

The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results

This is an audiobook for busy people. If you want less on your plate and more for your life and career, tune in to the #1 Wall Street Journal best seller, The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results. The ONE Thing will bring your life and your work into focus. Authors Gary Keller and Jay Papasan teach you the tricks to cut through the clutter, achieve better results in less time, dial down stress, and master what matters to you.

Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better

We live in a competition loving culture. We love the performance, the big win, the ticking seconds of the clock as the game comes down to the wire. We watch games and cheer, sometimes to the point of obsession, but if we really wanted to see greatness - wanted to cheer for it, see it happen, understand what made it happen - we’d spend our time watching, obsessing on, and maybe even cheering the practices instead.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

From Daniel H. Pink, the author of the groundbreaking best seller A Whole New Mind, comes his next big idea book: a paradigm-changing examination of what truly motivates us and how to harness that knowledge to find greater satisfaction in our lives and our work.

The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle

Internationally best-selling author of Last of the Amazons, Gates of Fire and Tides of War, Steven Pressfield delivers a guide to inspire and support those who struggle to express their creativity. Pressfield believes that “resistance” is the greatest enemy, and he offers many unique and helpful ways to overcome it.

Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

To most of us, learning something 'the hard way' implies wasted time and effort. Good teaching, we believe, should be creatively tailored to the different learning styles of students and should use strategies that make learning easier. Make It Stick turns fashionable ideas like these on their head and will appeal to all those interested in the challenge of lifelong learning and self-improvement.

The Art of Mental Training: A Guide to Performance Excellence, Collector's Edition

Achieve the champion mindset for peak performance. Reach new levels of success and mental toughness with this ultimate guide. Learn the "Science of Success" and prepare to excel. In this concise and highly acclaimed training guide, Peak Performance Coach DC Gonzalez teaches a blend of unique mental training technologies, sports psychology essentials, and peak performance methods that are effective and motivational. Get ready to increase your self-belief, self-confidence, and mental toughness using this powerful guide designed to help you reach new levels of success, sports performance and personal development.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

The guru to the gurus at last shares his knowledge with the rest of us. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman's seminal studies in behavioral psychology, behavioral economics, and happiness studies have influenced numerous other authors, including Steven Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman at last offers his own, first book for the general public. It is a lucid and enlightening summary of his life's work. It will change the way you think about thinking. Two systems drive the way we think and make choices, Kahneman explains....

The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership

Drawn from a series of deeply revealing conversations with coauthor Steve Jamison, The Score Takes Care of Itself offers Walsh's best leadership principles illustrated by anecdotes from his entire career. Additional insights and perspective are provided by his son Craig Walsh. The book will delight football fans and guide the vast business audience eager to learn how Bill Walsh motivated individuals and crafted winning teams.

Publisher's Summary

A New York Times best-selling author explores cutting-edge brain science to learn where talent comes from, how it grows, and how we can make ourselves smarter.

How does a penniless Russian tennis club with one indoor court create more top 20 women players than the entire United States? How did a small town in rural Italy produce the dozens of painters and sculptors who ignited the Italian Renaissance? Why are so many great soccer players from Brazil?

Where does talent come from, and how does it grow?

New research has revealed that myelin, once considered an inert form of insulation for brain cells, may be the holy grail of acquiring skill. Journalist Daniel Coyle spent years investigating talent hotbeds, interviewing world-class practitioners (top soccer players, violinists, fighter, pilots, artists, and bank robbers) and neuroscientists. In clear, accessible language, he presents a solid strategy for skill acquisition - in athletics, fine arts, languages, science or math - that can be successfully applied through a person's entire lifespan.

What the Critics Say

"I only wish I'd never before used the words 'breakthrough' or 'breathtaking' or 'magisterial' or 'stunning achievement' or 'your world will never be the same after you read this book.' Then I could be using them for the first and only time as I describe my reaction to Daniel Coyle's The Talent Code." (Tom Peters)

If you enjoyed the well supported and interesting concepts presented in such books as Predictably Irrational, Outlier, The Drunkard's Walk, you will find this book VERY unsatisfying. First, the author who is clearly quite talented writing in non scientific areas presents a series of anecdotes as if they were data and overly focuses on theory with little support. The writing does not present a strong case for any of his beliefs nor does he consider that success has many facets - not just the one he chooses to write about. His nonscientific background and thought process is clearly evident. Most annoying is his presentation of the concept that the production of myelin is the key to such things as memory, physical skills. This is an interesting theory but as he himstates, our knowledge of myelin is only a few percent of our knowledge of neurons - which we still don't completely understand. Yet, he raises the myelin issue throughout the book without support or evidence. He also thinks that certain methods of learning in select training center are what makes them extraordinary producers of successful atheletes. However, he does not address or acknowledge any other factors that may have played a role. The way he presents it, if you go to one of these training centers, you will become a world class athelete.

There has been a rapid growth in the field of neuroplasticity over the past few years. Much of that has not been available to the unintiated with a few exceptions. Now, Daniel Coyle has aptly filled that gap in "The Talent Code." This is a remarkable survey and application of the current research in the field. Don't let the topic keep you away from this valuable introduction to this field.

Individuals with children will find benefit for their offspring, adults trying to acquire new skills will find hope, and everyone will be informed by this wonderful book. The dynamic shift in neuro-theory and practice has dramatic implications for every area of our lives.

Otherwise, the book is well written and the reading is just excellent. A companion book which listeners might also enjoy covering tangential issues is "Outliers: The Story of Success" by Malcolm Gladwell.

To attribute mastery of certain skills solely to myelin is reductionism to the point of absurdity and is not backed up by the research (much of which has yet to be been done). After giving a brief description of myelin and myelination, nothing different that I learned in high school biology 20 years ago, he jumps directly to unsubstantiated claims using only a few quotes from neuroscientists in the field, one of which is "wow", as the bridge.

You can tell this book is targeted less to readers of science popularization and more to the self-help crowd by Coyle's snappy selection of terms like "Ignition" and "Matrix". The music used in the audiobook between chapters provides further evidence.

At times Coyle talks about myelin as if he invented it and was making it available to you as a special offer on late night television for only 14 easy installments of $19.95.

This book is at its best when discussing talent "hotbeds" and the teaching strategies used by master coaches. I would have preferred it to be suplemented by an insightful overview of the current literature written for those with a basic education, as Stephen Pinker does for Linguistics. But instead, Coyle sells a worldview mostly of his own invention.

Full of elucidating anecdotes that support the author's theory that talent (i.e. the talent code) is due to 3 facets of learning: deep practice, ignition/motivation, and master coaching. And a heavy handed dose of talk about myelin, the stuff that wraps around neural pathways.

I recommend this for anyone working with children or anyone interested in improving/honing skills.

I just don't get why the author wasted a sizeable chunk of his book on the topic myelin. "We are myelin beings," he said. To which I would say, "What??!!" It's like saying "We are water beings." We're made up of 75% water, right? I really find it inane.

However, I appreciate the research that he did. Old stuff, really. I also appreciate the three components of talent he mentioned: deep practice, ignition, master coaching. However, I find deep practice (which is actually based on Anders Eriksson's "deliberate and effortful" practice) and master coaching more useful than ignition and all that stuff about myelin.

The book is not supposed to be a scientific treatise on myelin. Just mentioning the importance of myelin is enough.

The real gems of this book are those parts where he describes his visits to the talent hotbeds. The information he presented is practical and solid examples are indeed more useful. Readers can glean their own insights from them.

I would still recommend buying this book because of the information and the anecdotes from the talent hotbeds. This book, however, could have been written better.

This book has the potential to transform the way you study and teach. There is no silver bullet when it comes to learning but this book has the potential to make you significantly more effective, like many of the people the author uses as examples.

Have you ever wondered what causes a bell curve in a classroom full of very intelligent pupils? The answer is so unexpected yet obvious at least for a group of students learning to play an instrument. I won???t spoil it for you by giving you the answer.

Whether you are instructing yourself or someone else the principles in this book apply. Understand why having a desire to learn and the passion to follow through are essential but only part of the equation. Learn what it takes to not just study or practice but truly use deep practice to its fullest. See how you can be more productive and reduce the time required to practice at the same time.

Sorry but I could not get into this book.
Interesting points, but poor support for his theseus.
Reads and sounds like a Phd Dissertation supported by a bunch of anecdotal examples but no true substance.
Throughout most of the first half of the book, the author POUNDS and REPEATS and noodles you to death repeatedly about Myelin. I wish he would have just mentioned this once or twice instead of repeating the same theme 20 times in essentially the same words. sorry but just plain lame. I have a science and medical background. What is says is true, but it sounds like a broken record stuck in the same groove. The anecdotal tales are mildly amusing. However, I would NOT recommend wasting your time with this one.

This book explains the science of how skills are built -- in the brain, myelin wraps around nerves and increases signal strength, speed, and accuracy. The more you practice, more myelin is built. The brain is like any other muscle -- it gets better and stronger with continued practice. The key is that the practice be purposeful and deep. A student studying a topic shouldn't just read the chapters a few times. The student needs to do practice exams. Identify the wrong answers and keep working on those problems until she can get 100% on them. Developing talent is about "knowing" what you're doing (like why is something right, not just memorizing equations or why does a swing cause the ball to go in certain direction, not just perform exactly the same swing over and over). By "knowing," you can feel a move is wrong or hear a musical note is off immediately.

There are also plenty of stories of how people "became" talented. People don't become world-class athletes and musicians overnight. They weren't prodigies who created classical pieces on their first try. They were usually exposed to the field at a young age, they were motivated to continually develop their skills, and there were coaches and mentors in their lives who knew the right encouragement to give to get them to do better. This is valuable book for anyone who wants to be an expert in a field or who is a parent/teacher/coach. An interesting observation was that many of the world-class people didn't have professional teachers/coaches in the early years of their learning. They had the right teachers/coaches who kept them committed to deep practices.

I think this book could have included specific techniques for improving skills. I noticed the author has another book "The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills." I haven't read it but it probably complements this book.

I find Chinese food has a way of being great, bit by bit, but less than satisfying as a meal.

That's also how I would describe this book: a series of truly interesting anecdotes which fail to hold together when considered as a complete work, when examined through the lens of science.

The link between talent and myelin may or may not be solid, but here the case in favor of it feels like pseudoscience, with the same depth of examination you'd expect to see on the Discovery Channel, or some other outlet for science-as-entertainment.

Many people may find that this mode of presentation suits them. But those who demand a bit more rigor will probably be dissatisfied.

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